


In This Sign You Will Conquer

by Spylace



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, And other monsters too, Character Death, Everyone has their own agenda, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Moral Dilemmas, Other, They get better, sort of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-09
Updated: 2014-01-09
Packaged: 2018-01-08 03:05:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1127614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim Kirk is the righteous man; Leonard McCoy happens to be the wayward angel who refuses to watch him break.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Repost!
> 
> A fun idea I had while I was (am) teaching kids the finer points of how not to fail at English (ahaha). For new years, I decided to give this a second go :3

Every time he closes his eyes, he can hear Gaila _scream_.  
  
“ _I could use a little help right about now!_ ”  
  
It’s late. He isn’t thinking though that could be the liquor talking, burning a hole straight through his gut. The woman looks at him coyly, her expression a mixture of appraisal and hazy desire. Normally, the hunter would have returned the look with equal amounts of interest and opportunity. But right now he takes a slow pull of his liquid courage and swishes around his mouth, dismayed to find himself sobering up just a little.  
  
“Well now,” she says in a husky voice, a gurgle of laughter trailing after. “It’s a little too late for that now don’t you think?” She bites down on her pinky, raising her perfectly arched eyebrows. “James Tiberius _Kirk_ —” She pronounces, circling him in obvious triumph as she brushes the pads of her fingers against his shoulder. “ _Pleasure_ ”  
  
“It’s Jim.” The hunter slurs, wondering if it isn’t too late to throw the bottle in her face. Instead, it slips from his right hand and splashes his boots with holy water-laced whiskey. He stands there with a blank look at the growing stain on the loose gravel. He remembers Gaila before, right after a shower, a towel around her shoulders but nothing else, a can of cold beer in one hand and a thickly coiled emerald snake climbing her spine. A tower of ivy had made the length of her legs between the ankle and the thigh, newly unfurled spring leaves her hips and beyond.  
  
“ _Jim_ ” The crossroads demon repeats meaningfully, her grin widening into a Cheshire cat’s smile. He gasps at her cool touch, flinching when a perfectly manicured nail parts his dried lips. She throws her arms around the his neck, her breasts pushed up against his chest. “Come to barter your soul with little old me?”  
  
His face twists.  
  
“I shouldn’t have to." They had split up, for a stupid reason he can't remember now. "You hurt her." The demons had found her and they had taken her. And in the cover of darkness, they had destroyed her.  
  
By the time he broken into an abandoned warehouse on the corner of 5th and 8th, Gaila had been gone, she had gone mad. "You _broke_ her." There was too much damage, her flesh carved out and her toes all but shorn from her feet. There had been a brand seared into the pale of her thighs and roses of her own blood and bruises across her stomach. She had screamed at his touch, screamed for him and yet unable to recognize. "And I... I... couldn’t do anything to save her.”  
  
She laughs and shrugs, her dark ringlets tickling his chin.  
  
“So we are in agreement then? I fix your girlfriend and I come to collect your soul in 10 years.” Jim sways on his feet and she twists a hand in his collar. “10 years... that’s 10 more than you’ve ever expected to survive.”  
  
He closes his eyes.  
  
“Yes”  
  
“Excellent” She hisses but her grip does not loosen. She leans forward to seal the deal when a hand wrenches her back and turns her around.  
  
“Sorry darlin’,” the stranger drawls, a hand pressed lovingly against the side of her face. The demon pales immediately, her breath shallow as she struggled to get away from his touch. “He ain’t for you to take.” She bares her teeth, black smoke and lightning pouring out of her mouth and nostrils. Her eyes flash irrevocably as she lets out a string of oaths that has Jim taking a step back in spite of himself.  
  
The stranger wraps his arms around her struggling form, a circle of hellfire alighting their ankles as the demon tosses her head back and screams. Her essence burns and bubbles like black tar from her pores. The fire, as suddenly as it appeared, dies, sucked into the vacuum of space. The demon’s body falls limp into the stranger’s arms, his reassurances low and soothing as he lays her against the scorched earth.  
  
Once he is finished checking over, he looks up and glares at Jim.  
  
“You couldn’t wait five minutes for me to close someone up?”  
  
“Excuse me?” Jim asks, incredulous. His brain is still stuck when the man exorcised a demon without uttering a single word in Latin. Unless ‘you’ll be alright darlin’’ said in an increasingly thickening southern accent was a diminutive of ‘be gone evil spirit’. He would have definitely paid attention to Hikaru's lectures more often if it had.  
  
Strangely, the stranger looked less than impressed his response.  
  
“’I could use a little help right now’ ring a bell?”  
  
“You... you heard that?”  
  
The stranger ignores him in favor of assessing the lack of cloud cover in the sky. He doesn’t blink for a full minute then says succinctly ‘shit’ except not because he stretches out the vowels until it sounds like he is tying two words together with a hyphen. “Well come on then.” He says irritably, assuming that Jim knows who or what he is—he doesn’t.  
  
The hunter gapes.  
  
“Come where? Who the fuck are you?”  
  
The stranger opens his mouth then snaps it shut.  
  
“We—ell,” he says with a tired expression, rubbing the five o’ clock shadow at his jaw. “Seein’ as how I’ve rebelled against the heavenly host, be might surprised if there’s anything left to my name ‘cept my bones. Call me McCoy, Leonard McCoy.”  
  
“Bones then.” Jim decides promptly, much to McCoy’s chagrin. “Now...”  
  
But McCoy doesn’t wait. And before he knows it, Jim is kissing the speckled linoleum of the Clarinda Treatment Complex puking his guts out. There are spots dancing in front of his eyes. He tells the other man as such when two fingers brush against the nape of his neck and he can see straight again.  
  
“Don’t be such an infant.” McCoy barks as he steadies Jim.  
  
“Wait, wait, where are we going?”  
  
“Your friend needs help right?”  
  
“You can fix her?”  
  
“Trust me kid, I’m a doctor. I know what I’m doing.”  
  
“I’m not a kid.” Jim complains as he followed McCoy down the hall. They stop in front of room 303, patient listed as Abigail Olson. He holds out his hand. “Jim Kirk.” McCoy nods with a wry smile but takes the hand anyways.  
  
“I know.”  
  
“You know, of course you know.” Jim grumbles as they push the door open and step inside.  
  
Gaila is in a wheelchair facing the window with a spectacular view of the parking lot below. The orderly standing behind her turns around, swift and angry. McCoy is behind him in a blink of an eye, a hand at the base of his neck with his fingers splayed over the spine. The orderly goes down like a rock.  
  
Jim whistles appreciatively, “Woah, you’ve got to teach me how to do that.”  
  
Gaila shakes. Even with her back to them and unassuming, she shakes. She tumbles out of her seat with a half-stifled scream, her eyes open and her lack of teeth very obvious. Her face is slack, her eyes mad and Jim goes to her before she spits in his face and kicks in his ankle. He goes down hard, proving that Gaila isn’t gone—just lost deep inside. Before he could attempt his misbegotten venture once more, McCoy steps forward and lays a hand against her bare scalp. She falls quiet immediately with a timorous whimper and Jim can no longer lift a finger.  
  
McCoy speaks to her in a calming tone that soon transforms into velvety lyrics that would have had him inappropriately hard at any other time. But this is Gaila, his sometimes _sister-lover-half-succubus-my-mother-was-attacked-by-a-incubus-so-deal-with-it-Gaila_. He holds his breath and prays because he doesn’t have a suitable reaction for witnessing healing of biblical proportions.  
  
“Shh sweetheart, you’re alright.” McCoy murmurs as he breathes into her skin. He closes his eyes, his eyelashes impossibly long—dusting Gaila’s pale cheeks with flecks of color as he puffs gently against her flayed throat. Gaila’s response is almost feral. She is hungry, her nips quick and bloody. Her hands, bound tight in sheathes of bandages do little more than bruise the man’s back and neck. But McCoy doesn’t seem to mind as he presses close, as though he might like to sink into her body down to her bones and live there.  
  
Jim’s never felt such terrible jealousy, not even the times his mom clearly favored Sam. Not even when Sam, with his perfect scores and his perfect record, went off to college and left him and his mother in bumfuck, nowhere. Not even when Carol Marcus dumped him for the quarterback Anderson three hours before the prom. But with a yelp, McCoy suddenly rolls off, a hand lingering suspiciously over his back. Gaila lets out a broken giggle, looking more alive and herself in a long time.  
  
“Gaila?” He asks quiet and tentative like a little boy. The look she gives him is painful but it is Gaila the original. This is the Gaila who likes to drink and gamble with the best of them. He lets out an embarrassing whoop. He wants to hug her and spin her around. He wants to make a toast to friends, family and people that have survived over the years. He wants to make amends for all the things he has done—well except for running Anderson down into a lake with his truck. So instead, he grabs McCoy and lays one on him. He tastes like bourbon and whiskey, blood and peaches with a minty aftertaste. When he pulls away McCoy’s staring at him with a dumbstruck look in his eyes.  
  
Jim really can't help but grin in response.   
  
Gaila gently unravels the bandages from her hands. Her exotically colored nails are long gone, rotting on the floor of the demon’s nest, but her hands are whole and healing. Jim tightens his grip on McCoy, a stranger and apparently the guardian angel he never knew he had but McCoy jerks his head sideways, a weary look clamping down on the faint blush across his freckled cheeks.  
  
Jim is tempted to lick them.  
  
“We’ve got to go.”  
  
“They’re coming.” Gaila says in a hollow voice, the same that had driven Jim to bargain with a crossroads demon in the first place.  
  
McCoy looks at her consideringly and she repeats, “Oh my god they’re coming.”  
  
Jim’s hands glance off her arms, down her waist and her hips. He doesn’t know where to touch or if he should but he wants to comfort her. He wishes desperately that he could comfort her. Before he can make out the words—“What’s coming?” McCoy grabs him by the wrist and gently takes Gaila’s in hand.  
  
“We’re out of here, _now_.”  
  
Jim braces for the same vertigo accompanied him the last time but nothing happens. They are still in Abigail Olson’s room 303 at Clarinda Treatment Complex.  
  
McCoy sucks in a sharp breath.  
  
“ _Gabriel"_


	2. Chapter 2

Jim Kirk has always known there was someone watching over him.  
  
It is a persistent itch between his shoulder blades, the slight clench of his calf muscles as though bunching together for a run, a minor ache in his temples when he is about to do something incredibly stupid. But Jim Kirk, at his core, is a nonbeliever. He chalks up ninety-percent to his infallible sense of self-preservation and ten to skills belying his identity as a hunter. It isn’t rocket science mixing together salt and gunpowder. Nor is it difficult to figure out how to duck when a werewolf takes a swipe at you. Reading signs of demonic presence is not impossible and he trusts his gut more often than not when it tells him to hold and find another way.   
  
“ _Gabriel_ ” McCoy sighs and Jim freezes. It isn’t because he is surprised to see an intruder where there had been none or is it the fact that McCoy recognizes him in some way. But it is how he says the name—the last syllable dragged out in a reminiscence of the old south, full of regrets, longing and suffering—because his lips do not move. Still he hears it clearly in his mind, louder than his heart beating a steady thrum against his ear. And at that moment, Jim hears and he believes. He believes that there is some good left in this world; beyond Gaila, beyond family, beyond the loose network of friends earned through blood and tribulations. There may be God, there may be something pure and holy that has been watching over him all this time.  
  
Gabriel is no taller than Jim or McCoy but he gives off the impression of being towering, far more imposing than any man has the right to be. He steps into the room out of thin air, a trick that should have been obvious to Jim’s moonshone eyes but isn’t. The newcomer is dark-haired and dark-eyed, his long and tapered fingers sweeping behind his lower back and rearranging themselves into loose fists. Jim’s own hands inch towards the concealed pistol in his jacket. McCoy squeezes his wrist. He stops, just in time to see the unmistakable shape of wings framed against the starlit window.  
  
Gabriel is an angel.  
  
A fucking _angel_ —   
  
Jim has to resist the urge to laugh.  
  
Gabriel inclines his head.  
  
“I did not believe” he starts blandly, gracing Jim and Gaila a cursory look. “Chapel when she brought us news of your betrayal.”   
  
There is an imperceptible flinch, covered by a sullen scowl. Jim thinks that he is dreaming when he feels something—lighter than air and soft—brush against his face. He breathes deep and feels McCoy stiffen, his back ramrod straight and deceptively fragile. And he realizes that McCoy is probably an angel himself, high in favor if he can think of defying Archangel Gabriel. There is little in terms of credible angelic mythos and not for the first time tonight, Jim feels a passing sense of fear. He knows nothing of the heavenly host, didn’t know they even existed until now. And what he doesn’t know, he can’t _kill_.  
  
Still, he chokes down a half-formed warning when Gabriel reaches out with his elegant hands. McCoy jerks his head to the side, his shoulders folded inward as though threatening to collapse on himself. Jim has no idea why this alarms him so much but he tugs on the other man’s hand, pulling him backwards. McCoy’s breathing is short and irregular. Haltingly, he follows—his eyes on his brother’s at all times.   
  
Gabriel considers this and cocks his head, freeing his wrist easily from the other’s startled grip. The whorls of his index and middle finger slide down the uneven knuckles. “It seems that I stand corrected.”  
  
“Dammit Gabriel,” McCoy manages, aggrieved. “I’m a doctor, not a cow hand.”  
  
“I find your protest illogical considering there are no bovid to be captured.”  
  
“You know what I mean!”  
  
“Bones,” the hunter asks as calmly as possible. “What is going on?”  
  
Gaila trembles behind them, the air electrified and wild. Pheromones Jim thinks, brought on by elevated stress levels. Then it clears as though sucked clean through a void. Gaila, who has never been religious save for a decorative cross she kisses after every successful hunt, goes down on her knees and begins to pray.   
  
Gabriel shakes his head.   
  
“Your actions are meaningless.”  
  
She hitches her breath; her head bowed and lets out a small sob. Jim bristles indignant but McCoy still has his wrist in an iron grip. He glares at the man who flexes his jaw but doesn’t let go. He doesn’t bruise but retains a broken ring of raised skin beneath the base of his palm.   
  
Gabriel’s nostrils flare lightly. “Step aside; I have no desire to harm you.”  
  
“Well Gabriel,” McCoy replies, his tone scathing. “That makes two of us. Try not to take it too personally.”   
  
“On the contrary, there is no logic in your actions. You are attempting to preserve the two of them knowing what they are, what they will become.”  
  
“Free will Gabriel. Humans are...”  
  
Gabriel says quietly  
  
“But you are not.”  
  
The stillness in the air is almost tangible. It is not said with any malice on his part—and perhaps that is why it hurts the most—it is a simple statement of fact. Gabriel takes advantage of the momentary distraction and lunges forward. Mccoy lets the hunter loose and meets his brother head on.   
  
“Jim, take Gaila and get out of here!”  
  
Gabriel’s eyebrows incline dramatically.   
  
“Are you genuine in your intentions to resist? It is as you have said, you are a healer. Your plan has less than 0.012% chance of success. Should you defeat me, others will come. Even if you strip yourself of your vessel, you will not be able to defend yourself against all of them.”  
  
“For the love of God man, there are people down here! They can still be saved!”  
  
“My apologies, but a decision was made.” The archangel seems almost thoughtful—concerned. He says uncertainly, “You were in accord.”  
  
And McCoy begs, “...Don’t do this.”  
  
“Bones, what the hell is going on?!”  
  
“The Apocalypse” McCoy snarls, parrying Gabriel’s attempts at getting past. “They’re going to raise Lucifer. Once he cleans house, they’re going to start over, clean-slate.”  
  
“Extermination” Gaila breathes; limp even as Jim helps her to her feet.   
  
“Correct,” the archangel confirms, “an estimated 99.97 percent of all life on Earth will be eliminated.”  
  
“And where is the big man upstairs in all this?”  
  
“Dad’s gone.” McCoy says and he looks stricken.   
  
At the same time Gabriel intones, “God is no longer here.”  
  
In a blink of an eye, he appears behind them, his hand lightly caressing Gaila’s exposed collarbone. He thumbs the nape of her neck, fingers curling around the loose material of her hospital gown. The action might have seemed amorous and sexual had it not been so clinical. Immediately, Gaila slumps forward with a small gasp. Jim lets out a strangled cry.   
  
“She’s fine, she’s _fine_! Jim you’ve got to get out of here!”  
  
“Fuck you McCoy!” A sliver of hurt threads itself across the lines of the angel’s face but Jim can’t be bothered to take notice. Gabriel looks uncharacteristically angry and he slips between the two struggling men, his hand held in a strange salute.   
  
“Human” he rumbles, choking the air out of the young man’s lungs. “You forget your place.””  
  
“No!” And where the two connect, it is like the crack of lightning and thunder crammed into one tiny space. The first thing that comes to his mind is of course how they don’t make walls like they used to anymore. There are bits of drywall floating all over the place, coloring the air a musty gray. Jim is pretty sure that he will end up with a petrified lung or two from all the air-born asbestos.   
  
The hunter struggles to his knees, Gaila an unconscious ball beneath him. He coughs, his eye tearing up. He can hear McCoy groaning from a little ways away. He gropes in the gray fog of the aftermath, unable to abandon his supernatural friend. Eventually, maybe seconds, minutes, hours later, his knuckles rap against a metal support beam. He follows it down and his nails dig into something warm and pulsating. McCoy groans on cue and Jim swears out loud as he discovers just what had happened to the rogue angel.  
  
“Bones!” He strips off his jacket and his shirt, trying to staunch the flow. McCoy coughs up more blood, the slick redness painting stripes down his chin. “ _Jim_ ” The other man gasps, pale with blood loss. But his eyes remain bright— _glowing_ , if Jim was being absolutely honest. The hunter knows too much about the outer mechanism of the human anatomy but very little of the inside. He knows that they are inside a hospital wing and logically there should be a slew of doctors and security pouring in any moment wondering about the big explosion on the third floor. He also knows that Gabriel is still here and if the man-sized hole in the wall was any indication, there is not much in the ways of filial love in the garrisons of the heavenly host.  
  
“C’mon, c’mon! Use your angel-fu already and get us out of here.”   
  
“Go kid run.” McCoy hacks out a laughter, his nostrils flecked with red. Gabriel watches their exchange serenely behind the austere comforts of Gaila’s room, as though it is not even in the distant realms of possibility that they will be able to cobble together a miracle out of their collective asses. He is untouched and free of the powdery dust plaguing the air, not a hair out of place as he stepped through the hole in the wall. McCoy holds a steady gaze with his brother even as he speaks to Jim, grabbing his hand with one and slowly skirting across the support beam with the other.   
  
“Not a kid Bones.” And McCoy looks up startled, before his face slowly relaxes into a rueful grin.  
  
“Jim,” he repeats, hooking a thumb beneath the hem of his ruined shirt. The hunter briefly considers asking for an IOU for a later occasion—because as hot as it is having a doctor-angel-whatever strip for him, this is a highly inappropriate situation. As though sensing his thoughts McCoy squeezes his hand. Gabriel looms close and he coughs with a wet sound. “Whatever you do, don’t say yes.”  
  
McCoy’s blood burns and boils down the surface of his palms. Gabriel reaches for them both and the man reveals the stretch of skin beneath his shirt, crumbling runes and sigils surrounding the seven points of a circle. A stroke of his thumb is enough to throw the archangel back in a halo of light. Jim holds on tight and for a moment, his touch keeps him there.   
  
Then he is gone, as though he had never existed in the first place.


	3. Chapter 3

Jim doesn’t remember what happens afterward, kneeling there in a pool of blood with a young nova exploding in his eyes. In the end, it is Gaila who pulls him to his feet and to the half-buried fire escape, the world outside glowing gold as light steals over the horizon. She hotwires a nurse’s maroon Honda while everyone else is in a state of panic over the explosion in her former cell. She floors the gas and the familiar-unfamiliar asphalt melts into a blur behind them. Jim’s hands ache and he realizes that he has clenched them into fists, nails digging bloody grooves into the meat of his hands. There are glass slivers and concrete still embedded in the flesh of his skin but he cannot bring himself to care.  
  
Thirty miles outside the town, sirens wailing like hellhounds at their heels, she pulls over and slumps into the steering wheel. Jim swears, pressing a hand on her bare shoulder. He pulls her back against the seat, checks her pulse, her eyes and the freckles on the tip of her nose. Gaila is shaking, almost vibrating beneath her skin. She gasps,  
  
“Jim, you’d better take over.”  
  
He gets them out of the state in two hours. He heads west, then north, loops back south as though trying to lose all their demons in the back mirror. They follow the endless skyline and the highways of American west. The only stops they make are to eat and to piss.  
  
Eventually, they end up at Blue Earth, Minnesota tucked deep where no one would notice if they weren’t looking. They reach a small church at sunset, the sky dipped crimson with the tips of the tall and scraggly grass dyed saffron. Shadows are beginning to snake through the gravel and make nests in the drying roots and fragile stalks. Gaila stifles a wet cough into her hand, tears flowing at the faded warmth. Jim stares at her, mouth slightly open and speechless.  
  
It is the most beautiful sight he has seen in a long time.  
  
They hold hands, Gaila sobbing with her face inflamed and bloated. They stay like that until dark, unaware or uncaring of the spectators gathered behind the stained glass, scrutinizing them like a bug on a stick. When night falls, Sulu comes out with mugs of hot chocolate in his hands. He sits down on the church steps and awaits their return.  
  


-

  
He phones his mother.  
  
Jim isn’t the good son; he never was and probably never will be. But he is the son that stayed, the son that chose the hunt. So he calls his mother, hums through the incessant dial tone and gets the answering machine instead. He squats behind the church, boots squishing the damp earth peppered with bits of mortar. He keeps hoping that she will pick up but she never does.  
  
“Hey ma,” he says brightly, “got someone killed today. I didn’t know him too well. I think I might have liked to. He was a guy you could depend on...”  
  


-

  
Sulu lights the candles one by one, a process that could have been hastened if he had let Jim help. But the blond sits quietly in the pews, staring up at the corpus and the disfigured face, the nails in his palms and the dark stain at his feet. He wonders what it might have been like if Jesus had been staked instead of being nailed to the cross.  
  
“Do you believe in angels padre?”  
  
“Theoretically, if demons exist, so must angels.”  
  
The last candle is lit and the other man offers a brief prayer. Jim breathes into the traces of frankincense and waits. Sulu sits down beside him; legs crossed with creases between his eyes. He looks worried, they both are. Gaila went to bed five hours ago with valium on her tongue. Miracles aren’t unheard of in their line of work. Seeing them first hand rarely is.  
  
“So you think they’re real.”  
  
“I know they’re real.” It’s past midnight, thrust along towards the nebulous dawn. Jim’s hands shake from too much coffee. He could be seeing doubles but he is unsure. He doesn’t want to go to sleep. There is a star in his eye that refuses to go out. “Angels... are warriors of God. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not much of a comfort seeing one.”  
  
“Aren’t they supposed to watch over us?”  
  
“Watch over us but not interfere. That was the price of freewill.”  
  
“But Bones...”  
  
“Jim, did this ‘Bones’ have an actual name? One that ended with ‘-el’ maybe?”  
  
“No, but he had one that started with one.” Jim jokes weakly. Sulu cracks a smile and stands up.  
  
“Leonard Horatio McCoy. Maybe you should start there.”  
  


-

  
It is disappointing that his guardian angel can so easily be found on the pages of Google. With enough digging, he even excavates an email, phone number, work place and even an article dedicated to him in the local newspaper. He also finds a missing person’s notice dated three days before McCoy’s appearance at the crossroads. Armed with knowledge, a flask of whisky and a fake FBI badge, Jim heads down to Savanna, Georgia. What greets him at the door surprises him. She in turn, simply looks frustrated and tired.  
  
“I told you everything I know.”  
  
Jim swallows the overly sweet tea and nibbles at the wedge of a pie. The woman in front of him is young and pretty in a way he wouldn’t have hesitated to hit on in another place, another time. She also wields a pitcher like a lethal weapon and looks like she wouldn’t hesitate to brain him with it.  
  
“We may have a new lead.” He says cautiously. “Are you sure there isn’t anyone McCoy could have confided to?”  
  
“Look, Len’s an orphan. We’ve always taken care of each other.”  
  
“Were you two ever...?”  
  
“Together?” She laughs, taking generous sips from her cup. “No, not for the lack of trying on my part. I was so mad at him the entire senior year. He took me out to the prom anyways. He always said that there was someone out there waiting for me.” She sniffles a little, wiping her eyes on the back of her hands. “He was right. When I heard that he just dropped off the face of the earth I couldn’t believe it. Len would never do something like this.”  
  
Jim clears his throat.  
  
“Ms. Darnell, do you mind if I take a look around the house?”  
  


-

  
The house is perfectly ordinary, two stories with a sprawling yard dotted with peach trees and one lemon. Inside are ordinary pictures and possessions Jim never had, semblances of family life Sam craved and abandoned him for. He thinks for a brief moment that he is mistaken. Maybe it is the house of another Leonard McCoy—no he could see the embryonic scowl present in several of the frames on the wall. But there was a touch of familiarity about the young McCoy he couldn’t quite put a finger on, almost as though he had known him somewhere before.  
  
McCoy’s room is painted a drab olive-grey and lined with bookshelves that reached the ceiling and threatened to punch through. There are school books, heavy medical tests and a car magazine with a love letter concealed cleverly inside. There is also a bible on the bottom shelf next to his bed and several CDs and cassettes stacked against the window. Jim leans down to touch the soft linen and pulls himself back. He looks under the bed and the desk and every nook and cranny a man could have hid in his room before declaring defeat.  
  
By chance he pulls out the bible and opens it. The pages fall open on Ezekiel 18 and there is a small date circled in the margins, March 22, 1980. Jim can’t explain the tears in his eyes when he goes downstairs.  
  


-

  
On whim, Jim gets drunk and stupidly decides to stand in the crossroads where he saw him first, wondering if his supposed intelligence could drop any lower than it is now. He has no bones to bury but many questions, no one else to ask. He screams himself hoarse for a while, scaring the local wildlife and anyone out for a midnight jog. He leans defeated against his car and takes the last drop of liquor from his flask. It is then he notices the man in the middle, hands in his pockets and whistling a jaunty tune.  
  
“Ain’t this a surprise? Look at ye.”  
  
“Who are you?”  
  
The stranger breaks out into a toothy grin when Jim groggily raises his head. He pats him heartily on the back until it’s enough to make him throw up.  
  
“Dun matter nane. Just wantae say yir angel’s still alive.”  
  
Jim stared at him in disbelief.  
  
“Why are you telling me this?”  
  
The stranger’s eyes turn red.  
  
“Because I dinnae want ye to say _yes_.”  
  


-

  
“I don’t understand. Yesterday, I was a normal guy...” Sulu snorts into his coffee, “a normal _hunter_.” The blond amends quickly. “And now there are angels and demons everywhere. What’s next? Hobbits?”  
  
“I don’t know what to tell you Jim. Are you sure you weren’t hallucinating?”  
  
Jim pouts.  
  
“How’s Gaila?”  
  
“Doing better, she can look at candles without screaming now.”  
  
Jim mulls over this and the fate of the universe, staring at the coffee grinds at the bottom of his terracotta mug. He has never seen a divine cameo appearance on edible substances and he supposes that he wouldn’t start now, even if he is inside a church. Reluctantly, Sulu takes pity on him and pours him another cup. He gives the other man a quick, thankful look and quietly blows on the steaming surface.  
  
“Hey, do you think he’s alive?”  
  
“Never heard of a dead angel.”  
  
“But he was human, he was real. He had family and friends who cared about him.”  
  
Sulu places a gentle hand over his head.  
  
“People care about you too.”  
  


-

  
Gaila refuses to come with him.  
  
“Demons lie.” Jim swears, trying to pull her back into his embrace. She struggles, flighty, like a half-wild thing, a bird or something squirmier like a chipmunk. He tucks her head beneath his chin and they fall into bed, rolling and swearing like they’re going to fuck. She butts her head against his throat and he bites his tongue. He ends up sitting on her stomach, holding her hands at bay.  
  
Tomorrow, his back will be black and blue.  
  
“Not if the truth hurts more.” Her eyes are hard, just like every other thing about her is hard now. At least she’s stopped trying to knee him into submission. “You didn’t see, you didn’t hear what I did Kirk. They’re coming for you, all of them. Every angel and demon on heaven, hell and earth are going to be gunning for your ass.”  
  
“Sounds like a Thursday.”  
  
Gaila smothers a bubble of laughter.  
  
“McCoy’s been looking for you for a long time. When he finds you, he’ll sell you out to his brothers.”  
  
“He wouldn’t.” The hunter counters automatically, knowing it to be true.  
  
“You don’t know that, Jim, please. I can’t go with you.”  
  


-

  
Predictably, Sulu gets tired of seeing Jim mope around his church and stealing bottles of sacramental wine. Though the pastor did not trust Jim on his own, he makes a few calls and rustles up an easy salt-and-burn a few towns over. As promised, the job is so simple that Jim, who has been spoiling for a fight, supernatural or no, walks into a bar and flirts with everyone on purpose. He pisses off the group of locals in the corner and when the situation escalates into a brawl, the barkeep kicks them all out with the wrong end of a shotgun.  
  
Jim spits blood in the bushes, laughing hard until tears squeeze out of his eyes. He gets into the car and wipes his mouth against his sleeves. His car purrs to life, the only constant in his little pocket of the world. The headlight shines a patch of ground overgrown with yellow starthistles.  
  
“Fuck” He mumbles through a broken nose. He bumps his head against the steering wheel. “Fuck”  
  
He is on the road, swerving past the dashed line in the middle at ninety miles an hour with the radio turned up unbearably loud. There is no one else on the road and for that, he is grateful. There is not a single cop or a state trooper to pull him over for speeding or throwing himself off a cliff. The car whines vainly in distress when he asks for more speed. Jim Kirk isn’t suicidal, not even close. But he feels the need to run, to put everything behind him and chase the nebulous skyline and what lies beyond.  
  
He races the shadows at the edge of the headlights. Just as he is about to turn them off, he sees— _feels_ —a flash of blue staring right at him. Jim swears as he slams down on the breaks, barely missing the kid who looks like he should be in bed past curfew. The car comes to a stop several yards away, followed by a fume of burnt rubber and the engines shot. He is surprised that he is even alive at this point.  
  
Jim stumbles out of the car to yell at the idiot who is dumb enough to stand in the middle of a highway. He stops when the kid appears in front of him, eyes solemn and blue-black ink running down every square inch of flesh beneath his collar. He looks like a stoner on high and Jim tells him so until the kid asks in a soft, lilting voice,  
  
“James Tiberius Kirk?”  
  
There is a smudge of blood across the bridge of his nose and a rapidly fading bruise beneath his right eye. The kid’s lips are tinged blue as though he is going into shock. Jim squints, aware that he isn’t the one to be passing judgments at the moment.  
  
“Kid, you okay?”  
  
The kid looks genuinely surprised at the question. He bobs his curly head, his accent thick and pronounced as he replies,  
  
“I am fine as you say, thank you for asking. Please answer the question. You are James Tiberius Kirk?”  
  
Jim winces.  
  
“Jim, please”  
  
“I need your help.”  
  
“Look, I can give you a lift back into town but...”  
  
“Nyet, the help is not for me.”  
  
The car squeaks, the wheels depressing slightly at the sudden weight. Jim turns around, wide-eyed. McCoy raises his hand in a lazy, mock salute.  
  
“Hey kid.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Legend (so far):
> 
> Jim Kirk as the righteous man  
> Winona Kirk as John Winchester  
> Leonard McCoy as a guardian angel  
> Spock as Gabriel who is wrathful  
> Hikaru Sulu as Pastor Jim  
> Scotty as the king of the crossroads =D


End file.
